1,720,959 research outputs found
The Quaker City: George Lippard's critique of capitalism through sensational advocacy for the disenfranchised
No full textThesis (M.A.)-- Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of EnglishNineteenth-century author and journalist George Lippard advocated for the
underprivileged by devoting himself to his self-founded labor union, "The Brotherhood of the
Union," as well as by incorporating fresh and fiery commentary on the political issues of the day
into his fiction. Novels like Empire City and New York addressed corruption in local politics,
exploitative practices in the emerging finance industry, and the horrors of slavery. Yet, Lippard's
most popular work, The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845), most clearly provides a
gritty and sensationalized depiction of the political and social corruption rampant in Philadelphia
in the mid-1800s.
In the following thesis, I explore how George Lippard's novel engages with the
antebellum period's unique intersection of spectacle, disability, and labor in order to argue that,
through the character of Devil Bug, Lippard exemplifies how a marginalized body might make
his own way as an independent businessman amidst the capitalist society that attempts to exploit
or negate bodies like his own. In my first section, I turn to the sensationalist popular culture that
prevailed in Lippard's time (freak shows, dime museums, city penny papers, etc.) and his own
engagement with this culture that turned the human body into spectacular entertainment. In my
second section, I further argue how the rise of Northern factory systems reinforced the notion of
the body as an object to be capitalized upon, and how I see Lippard rejecting this corruption of
the body. My final section examines Devil Bug's success operating within this capitalist system,
despite his non-normative physicality. However, I also uncover the drawbacks of Devil Bug's
participation in the capitalist system: although Devil Bug attempts to counteract his isolated
"abnormal" physical state by developing relationships, his all-consuming "goold"-focused
mindset problematically drives him to define these relationships as economic transactions
Emily Dickinson's Carlo, more than just a dog
No full textPresented to the 20th Annual Symposium on Graduate Research and Scholarly Projects (GRASP) held at the Rhatigan Student Center, Wichita State University, April 26, 2024.Research completed in the Department of English, Fairmount College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.During the 19th century, Emily Dickinson's poetry offers an extensive exploration of how she explores her autonomy as a woman poet interacting with the world around her including other women, men, and even animals. Animals provide a unique range of interaction for the poet as her works consider domesticated four-legged animal pets, those locally sourced wild animals found near the home, and exotic animals brought from overseas. While exploring these topics, it is also important to note Emily Dickinson's family's influence on her upbringing and awareness of animals. Dickinson's human-animal relationship with her pet dog Carlo provides the range of Dickinson's more in-depth intimacy and ideas regarding animals. Dickinson's writing highlights the importance of dog entities not only in her own life but how they may be used to bridge beauty and metaphor to human sentiments. These employed metaphors bring awareness to questions surrounding subjectivity, instances in which they are objectified (more or less), and instances where they are personified and anthropomorphized and perceived to have a soul or at the very least human expression in the same regard as Dickinson herself has. In the notable field of Victorian English, Dickinson is one of the most notable to not only highlight her relationship with her companion dog Carlo but allow him to be an entity to inspire her and those around her as a literary object both in letters, poems, and even in children's books.Graduate School, Academic Affairs, University Librarie
Middle-class identity and corporeal attachments in The Wide, Wide World
No full textThesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of EnglishEarly nineteenth century industrialization and capitalism stimulated growth in public labor forces and consumer markets. Though largely conceived as a male-centered history, industrialization upended the lives of women; who, acting as producers and consumers, established themselves as integral components of the capitalist system. In response to this social metamorphosis, white middle-class ideologies - such as the cult of true womanhood, sentimentalism, and the cult of domesticity - emerged to preserve feminine sensibilities and purity from the cruelties and corruption of the consumer market. In her wildly popular sentimental novel The Wide, Wide World, published in 1850, Susan Warner disseminates domestic, sentimental ideologies and explores the perversity of the capitalist world. Warner's young orphaned protagonist, Ellen Montgomery, exposes the particulars of female consumption and white, middle-class, female labor. Warner ultimately places Ellen on the margins of the economic world as an invisible domestic laborer with imperfect male-regulated access to consumer markets. Men dominate both the domestic and economic spheres, and the definition white middle-class manhood emerges in tandem with the definition of "true womanhood." Warner actualizes the subversive potential of the novel by exposing the economic subjection and the domestic regulation of women by the male-hegemonic systems that define and commodify womanhood
For his pleasure: A discovery of kyriarchal, casual, and culturally affective rhetoric and messaging in comics and graphic novels from 1980-2023
No full textThesis (M.A.)-- Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of EnglishThis research provides new and novel considerations of and methodologies for the analysis of visual language, in this thesis called graphic novels, comic books, and visual texts. The two primary areas focused on in this research are the selected graphic novels from Marvel and DC comics published in the years 1980 to 2023 and the secondary sources of peer reviewed academic articles, published historical works, and comic-centric books, which focus on or can be connected to the analysis of both comics and their cultural effects on readers. Regarding the aim of the thesis, rather than arguing for or against the proliferation and consumption of comics, my view aims to complicate and contextualize the subjects of kyriarchal oppression featured regularly in comics and graphic novels and how those casual injections of biased and oppressive rhetoric either negatively affect readers or reinforce widely held views within American culture of marginalized and oppressed peoples.
It is the conclusion of this writer that the complication of the subject of visual texts is necessary to assist non-readers of comics in viewing graphic novels as valid and equal to traditionally written literature. By connecting the primary and secondary sources in this thesis, the view of graphic novels and comic books as a genre of literature, readers of them and consumers of film adaptations of the texts are given a new opportunity to expand their consumption and critical analysis of literature in the future. If comics and graphic novels are considered as equal to traditionally written literature, this also affords academics the choice to include visual texts in their academic writings to expand and complicate their own research
Book review: Why we left: untold stories and songs of America's first immigrants
No full textClick on the DOI link to access the article (may not be free).North America in the seventeenth century was far from a "land of opportunity" to early Anglo-American peasant migrants, or so Joanna Brooks argues in Why We left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants. The working-class immigrants who arrived in this period faced a plantation labor culture profoundly different from the agricultural production practices common in England
A revolutionary soundscape musical reform and the science of sound in early America, 1760-1840
No full textClick on the DOI link to access the article (may not be free).American colonists initially encountered music in community settings, during worship services and public performances, as well as at dances and other social functions. The rise of singing schools in the 1720s and the growing accessibility of music in the mid eighteenth century, however, cultivated a wider appreciation for music as an individuated art. Early promoters in fact strongly advocated for music’s expansion in the United States by turning to the science behind sound; they argued that music’s impact on and engagement with bodily functions uniquely positioned music as a revolutionary aesthetic, capable of communicating to and regulating the emotions of its listening public. While scholars have described in detail the changing landscape of musical practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, no study has addressed the relationship between music’s description as an embodied aesthetic and a revolutionary rhetoric that centralized the body’s importance to the national venture. This essay thus examines how eighteenth and early nineteenth century discussions on music were linked to the political aims of independence through a shared discourse of sensibility. Influenced by music’s origins as a sacred art and an Enlightenment rhetoric interested in bodily functions, Americans living and working in the northeastern cities of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York employed a revolutionary rhetoric that advocated for the aesthetic as a method of reform, accenting music’s potential in safeguarding national harmony and, in the nineteenth century, producing social concord
Book review: Poe's Silent Music
No full textClick on the URI to access the article (may not be free).That scarce awake, thy soul shall deem / My words the music of a dream," proclaims the speaker of Poe's "Serenade" to his love, Adeline [Works, 1:223]. In so doing, "Serenade," titled after a type of nocturnal music, highlights Poe's definition of the musical art in its highest form as an elusive, if still expressive, medium—what he would call the "indefinitiveness" of "true music," or "its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character," in his 1844 "Marginalia" [Writings, 2:153]. Charity McAdams's Poe and the Idea of Music reveals that this at-times vexed relationship between words and music, and the potential for connection to an otherworldly realm, recurs with startling regularity throughout Poe's writings
The “Quietude of Conscience” and the Magnetism of Sound: Listening to Nathaniel Hawthorne's <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>
Get PDF In The House of the Seven Gables Nathaniel Hawthorne employs a soundscape particularly attuned to the modern dissonances and spiritual soundings of antebellum America. His novel interrogates the impact of these auditory-acoustic structures on constructions of the self, ultimately revealing the politics of audibility emerging in the nineteenth century. </jats:p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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